<div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post">Haslam: As you know, the league signed the collective bargaining agreement in the wee hours of the morning. Probably Saturday, and probably at three or four in the morning. The project of completing this collective bargaining agreement was a lot different than the last go around. I can?t give you the specifics, but just say that it took a lot of time to get the deal done. Because of the tweaks and the changes of the collective bargaining agreement? Here?s what we?ve used on a day to day basis for the collective bargaining agreement (holds up booklet). This little puppy has about 275 pages. The new collective bargaining agreement?(pulls out stack of papers about twice as thick as the old booklet). This is what the lawyers had to work with. The lawyers for the league and the lawyers for the player?s association had to lock themselves inside a room for about a month to get this thing hammered out. And there are a lot of words and a lot of words that needed some changes. While the commissioner and Billy Hunter announced the significant deal points, some of which are in the news release that we?ve handed out today; there are some dramatic changes that we?re all going to have to learn about. We?ll have more information from a team standpoint in the future. Yesterday we had a conference call with the league and the league?s senior lawyers did a presentation about the changes to the agreement and there were about 175 people on this conference call from all the teams in the league just to get additional information and get the opportunity to ask questions. </div> <div align="center">Source </div>
